Reflections from a Health Department Intern
When I was awarded the Ginsberg Community Leadership Fellowship last May, I knew I wanted to work at the Washtenaw County Health Department (WCHD). I had spent much of my college career engaging in research that was tangentially related to people. I completed an honors thesis and published a comprehensive review of my research, entailing the molecular mechanisms of a protein, Hexosaminidase-A, and its long-standing implications in Tay-Sachs Disease, a devastating lysosomal storage disorder with a life expectancy of 5 years from birth. I had chosen and designed this project because I wanted to publish data that gave people answers, because I wanted to help people heal, and because I knew what it meant to lose a brother, a son, the integral axis of a family to an illness with seemingly no cure. Throughout my career as an undergraduate researcher, I’ve learned that, oftentimes, it is easy to lose sight of who science is truly for, of the ways in which scientific advancement and discovery is by and for humanity first, and mostly, of how research does not begin and end at the lab bench. The WCHD is a testament to this cardinal truth: it recognizes that scientific research cannot exist without the critical framework of a community, that data is derived from the way people live and love, and good, sound, qualitative science can never be constructed without community care and input.
When I first began at the WCHD, I realized I had stumbled upon something monumental; the start of a new community health improvement process consisting of conducting a Community Health Assessment (CHA) and then developing a Community Health Improvement Plan (CHIP). Over the last year, I was able to watch the CHA dynamically evolve and comprehensively take on a life of its own. The Community Health Assessment was the product of meticulous planning, research, data gathering, dozens of workgroups and meetings, and most importantly, an attempt at community healing, that would soon become a part of Washtenaw County’s historical record. As an intern, I was able to help facilitate the State of Our Health event, a large-scale gathering for community partners to field counsel on WCHD’s top three health priorities for the next five years. I was able to help coordinate and lead Health for All website learning sessions for community members to render this critical community data all the more accessible. But most importantly, I was able to bear witness to the inner workings of a health department in one of Michigan’s most populous counties, to bear witness to all that it takes to keep a community alive.
The work the WCHD does is meaningful and forever necessary. I am honored that, for however short of a time, I was able to be a part of it. And to any future intern, the WCHD will change you if you let it. I am leaving this internship as a more thoughtful journalist, a more thoughtful person, and a more thoughtful researcher. My experiences with this work, I know so deeply, have set the integral foundation for my career as a physician scientist and biomedical researcher.